Author: Oriol Rius

phpList: newsletters i mailings de correu OpenSource

Reading time: 6 – 9 minutes

Fa temps l’O.Manyà em va demanar una aplicació per fer just això i no n’hi vaig saber dir cap, el més frustrant és que ja coneixia aquesta eina de fa molt de temps però mai li havia fet massa cas. De fet, la veia com una evolució del mailman. Però ara me’n adono que és algo molt més corporatiu, és a dir, no és pas una eina per gestionar llistes de correu (diria que no és capaç de fer-ho). Sinó que esta molt més orientat al concepte de newsletter o de mailings. O sigui, ideal per emetre comunicats d’empresa als nostres clients o per escriure mailings personalitzats als nostres clients informant del que sigui. Després de fer un repàs per les moltíssimes funcionalitats què té diria que la pinta és excel·lent. A més si ús passeu per la web del phpList veure-ho que té força screenshots i screencasts que poden donar-vos una idea molt aproximada de tota la funcionalitat que té l’eina.
A continuació adjunto el llistat de funcionalitats que té l’eina, com deia val la pena invertir-hi una estona en donar un cop d’ull. M’ha cridat molt l’atenció la possibilitat de poder generar mailings a partir de subscripcions a RSS. Així doncs, si a l’empresa tenim un blog podriem emetre un butlletí de notícies de forma automàtica gràcies a aquesta funcionalitat.

• The Web Interface lets you write and send messages, and manage phplist over the internet.
• phplist keeps sending messages from your web server, even after you shut down your computer.
• 100 000 + subscribers. phplist is designed to manage mailing lists with hundreds of thousands of subscribers. phplist is excellent with smaller lists too!
• No duplicate messages. No ‘forgotten’ messages. phplist manages message delivery with a message queue, ensuring that every subscriber gets the email message, and that no subscribers receive two copies, even if they’re subscribed to more than one list!
• Open/View Tracking tells you how many users opened your email message. This provides a minimum statistic, as many email clients with privacy or security policies block images (gmail, thunderbird, and others).
• Click Tracking tracks links and URLs. Statistics can be viewed by message, URL or subscriber.
• Multiple Subscribe Pages allow you to choose many different combinations of templates, languages, user attributes and lists.
• Templates are completely customizable, and make site integration a breeze.
• Multiple Templates on different subscribe pages can integrate phplist with several different web sites.
• Subscriber Attributes like ‘name’, ‘country’, and other personal information, are completely customizable. You can specify what information you need to get from users when they subscribe.
• User Specific Content. You can use Subscriber Attributes in message content to make each and every email message personalized with the subscribers name, country, or any other attribute.
• HTML email messages. Subscribers can be given the choice between text or html email messages. You decide whether subscribers can choose, what the default choice is, and what format a message is sent in: text only, html only, or both!
• The HTML Editor allows you to edit html messages from phplist using FCKeditor. TinyMCE is also available.
• Internationalization. phplist is available in English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Traditional Chinese, Dutch, Vietname and Japanese and translation work is in progress for other languages.
• Easy Install via Fantastico, FTP upload, or SSH.
• Multiple List Administrators. The super-admin can assign lists to List Managers, who can manage their users and lists. The super-admin user can ‘prepare’ messages that can be sent by list managers to their lists.
• Subscriber Preferences. Every email message contains personalized URLs for subscribers to update their preferences or unsubscribe. Subscribers can update their own information and keep your database up to date. Unlike most other mailing list managers, in phplist subscribers can change their email address.
• The User Management tools are excellent to manage and maintain large databases of subscribers.
• Bounce Processing keeps your database clean of unused and non-existent email addresses.
• Advanced Bounce handling let’s you teach phplist to distinguish between permanent and temporary message-delivery errors. You can define automated actions on receipt of bounce messages according to matches with your regular expressions.
• CSV Import and Export. Use CSV and tab delimited files to import your existing list of users or to export the users on the phplist system for use in your in-house database. phplist’s database has a ‘foreign key’ to help keep multiple copies of databases synchronized without duplicating users.
• Attachments can be uploaded and included in messages for download.
• Send a Web page. Tell phplist the URL of a web page you want to send to your users, and phplist will fetch it and send it. You can even put subscriber-specific parameters in the URL.
• RSS feeds can be automatically sent to a mailing list weekly, daily, or monthly.
• PDF messages can be automatically created and sent as attachments to ensure that your message is seen the way it was designed by all your subscribers, regardless of their email message reader.
• Batch Processing is useful in shared hosting environments. Set the maximum number of sent messages in a given time period.
• Throttling can limit the load on your server so it doesn’t overload.
• Domain Throttling limits the number of emails to specific domains to keep on the friendly side of their system administrators.
• Scheduled Sending let’s you tell phplist when the message is to be sent.
• Repetition. A message can be repeated automatically to send updated dynamic content and attachments.
• Text from HTML. Text email messages are managed fluently in phplist. phplist will automatically create a text version of an html message. Optionally the message composer can create it manually.
• PGP signing and encrypting (soon).
  Send your message digitally signed or encrypted, or both.
• Email to Fax (soon).
  Configure the details of your favourite email 2 fax gateway and phplist will send the HTML version of the message as a PDF attachment to your fax gateway. The fax will include the images in the HTML.
• Integration with other tools. Several systems exist on the internet that integrate phplist with your favourite CMS or blogging tool. Check out the Documentation for a list.